EU bans herbal remedies: another victory for corporate interests

When the EU does something truly unpopular, it usually builds in a delay. Eurocrats know that national ministers are likelier to agree to measures which will blow up in the laps of their successors. Thus the restrictions on natural and alternative medicines, which were passed in 2004, will hit herbalists' shelves in April.

The Independentreports that hundreds of traditional plant remedies are under threat, including Meadowsweet, Cascara Bark and Pau D'Arco. Some products will be proscribed outright; others subjected to a prohibitively expensive licensing regime.

Why is the EU criminalising a harmless activity pursued by 20 million Europeans? I say "harmless" advisedly: many of my constituents are convinced of the benign effects of herbal, homeopathic, ayuvedic and Chinese medicines; others think the whole thing is a load of cobblers. For what it's worth, the love of my life is in the former category and, as the author of Proverbs wisely observes, "better a dinner of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith" (rarely could the bit about the herbs have applied so appositely). Anyway, whoever is right, these bits of bark and sap and leaf are plainly not detrimental to human health. If they were, I think we'd know about it by now. So what the devil is Brussels playing at?

Three factors are in play. First, Eurocrats love regulating things. The argument that you should leave well alone – that herbalists have no interest in poisoning their customers, that the presumption of innocence should apply in this as in any other case, that the trade has flourished for centuries without state oversight – is anathema to them. To the EU official, "unlicensed" is synonymous with "illegal".

Second, the EU has fallen for that modern idiocy known as "the precautionary principle". As I wrote when this ban was first mooted, you can't prove a negative. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was widely believed that the noise of a passing train would cause a pregnant woman to miscarry. Had we applied "the precautionary principle", we would never have laid a single inch of track. After all, the rail operators of the day couldn't prove that they wouldn't cause miscarriages, any more than today's health stores can prove that their wares are not toxic.

Third, and most important, the ban suits the big pharmaceutical corporations, who lobbied openly and enthusiastically for its adoption. The large chains will be able to afford the compliance costs. Smaller herbalists will not, and many will go out of business, leaving the mega-firms with something close to a monopoly.

Here's the thing, though. Such a ban would never have got through the national legislatures. MPs would have been deluged, as MEPs were, by letters from thousands of constituents who felt that their health was being imperilled. In a national parliament, this would almost certainly have been enough to block the proposal; but the EU was designed more or less explicitly to withstand public opinion. Lobbyists understood from the outset that their best chance was to push through in Brussels what no democratic parliament would accept. See, once again, how the EU has become a mechanism for the advancement of corporate interests in defiance of the common weal.